Garden of Alla/h: Old Hollywood

The Garden Of Alla started as one large mansion bought in 1918 by Alla Nazimova. Nazimova, a silent screen actor, added 25 bungalows to the property, which stood near Crescent Heights and Sunset. More pictures here.

Alla Nazimova, the entrepreneur behind the Garden of Alla, emigrated from the Crimean Sea region to New York in 1906, when she was about 27. SHe became a stage actress, adding English to the many languages she spoke. Most biographies on the web point out that Alla was a uncloseted and bold lesbian.

She came to Hollywood in 1916 and made several silent films, including Camille--in which she starred opposite Rudolph Valentino. She bought the mansion in 1919 for $65,000, according to TheOldDyke.UK site.

She then spent another small fortune landscaping it and putting in a pool that supposedly was shaped like the Black Sea and had underwater lights. . . supposedly. Whether all that's true or not, the new Garden of Alla was the Chateau Marmont of its day--the place to stay in Hollywood for the rich and famous.

The hotel that Nazimova eventually made of her mansion was home to the most brilliant, scandalous, and witty Hollywood personalities . Many (like George S. Kaufman, Alexander Wollcott, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchly) were transitioning from New York to Hollywood, in the early days of talking movies. Chaplin, Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Fatty Arbuckle, John Barrymore, Clara Bow, Lillian and Dorothy Gish--they all either lived or partied at the Garden of Alla. Barrymore, in fact, kept a bicycle handy so he could get to parties and bars quickly.

A spicy online version of the Garden of Alla story, written by Walter Lockley, includes a story from Harpo Marx's biography Harpo Speaks, about a "royal battle of the bands" between him and a noisy neighbor--who turned out to be Serge Rachmaninoff, famed composer. Harpo grew annoyed by his neighbor's all-day practising. So he fought back and drove Rachmaninoff away by playing the first four bars of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C # Minor, over and over again. Racmaninoff hated that piece, it turned out, and after a few hours, asked to be moved to another bungalow.

During Prohibition (1919 to 1933, I think), when no liquor could be legally bought in Los Angeles, the inhabitants of the Garden of Alla made a valiant attempt to fill the swimming pool with their empty liquor bottles. They failed, but they tried really, really hard.

The imporverished Nazimov lost ownership of the place, either during the Depression, or even earlier, as her film career fizzled. The new owners added an "h" was added to the name: Garden of Allah.

For a decade or so, it continued as a trendy abode for transplanted New Yorkers and celebrities-hiding-out. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lawrence Olivier, Talullah Bankhead, Orson Welles, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester were some of the denizens who favored it then. Nazimova herself moved back in 1939, taking bit parts in movies until she died in 1945.

The Garden of Allah slowly decayed into a sleazy dive, and in 1959 fell victim to the bulldozers. Time Magazine memorialized the closing here.

This picture shows the site now.

A fiinal bit of trivia: Nancy Reagan is Nazimova's goddaughter.